Google's China Standoff

By Sabu Mathai
Contributor

After operating its search engine in China for four years, Google announced in January that it will no longer censor its search results in China. Google began operating in China in 2006, and it did so knowing it would have to comply with China's stringent censorship policies. Administered by the Communist Party, censorship in China has consistently targeted voices of political opposition, religious groups, and human rights activists. Among topics that are typically censored are democracy, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the spiritual group Falun Gong, Tibetan independence, Taiwanese independence, and pornography.

When Google officially entered the Chinese market in 2006 and agreed to omit material about politically sensitive issues such as Tiananmen Square or Tibet from its search results, many saw the decision to play by China's censorship rules as a betrayal of Google's informal company motto - "Don't Be Evil." But Google defended its decision, claiming that engaging China and providing its citizens with some access to information would in the long-run do more to promote openness in China than a complete "withdrawal on principle."

As it explained in a statement published on its blog on January 12, 2010, the decision that it would no longer censor its search results came after Google detected "cyber attacks on its corporate infrastructure originating from China," as well as similar attacks on at least 20 other large corporations. According to Google, "a primary goal" of the attack was to collect information about Chinese human rights activists. While the statement fell short of making direct accusations against China, it did create the impression that the attacks were part of Chinese corporate and political espionage.

Google's statement has left us with more questions than answers. Skeptics feel that Google's standoff with China has less to do with human rights and espionage than it has to do with Google's business strategy.

Many commentators have stressed Google's second place performance against homegrown search engine Baidu, chalking up Google's shift in policy as a way to save face while calling it quits on the Chinese market. Second place might seem less than Google-like almost anywhere else in the world, but Google still commands a respectable 30% market share amongst China's 360 million Internet users. Those don't seem like the kind of numbers that would send Google rushing for the exit.

Other speculation focuses on additional hurdles Google faces operating as a foreign business in competition with Chinese corporations. Uneven treatment between Google and Baidu is a likely source of Google's problems since China has seemed to single out Google for purported violations of its censorship policy. By making the situation unworkable despite Google's best efforts, China may have pushed Google out simply to give Baidu a boost and increase its control over the Internet.

Regardless of what really drove Google's new stance, the Chinese government's strong commitment to censorship makes it unlikely that Google will be able to continue operating in China without censoring its results in some fashion. Google is currently the only significant alternative to homegrown search engines like Baidu. As a result, many worry that Google's departure from the Chinese market and the absence of its competitive presence will only increase the Chinese government's ability to filter and monitor the information that its citizens can access. But at the very least, by alerting Internet users that their search results were censored and suggesting additional search terms, Google has already made Chinese Internet users more aware of the nature and dimensions of censorship over their search results.

The Highest Barrier to Information Access in India

Google's standoff with China has raised questions about just how freely information flows in other societies. So just how free is the flow of information in India today? Well, the answer depends on how you measure it.

Internet freedom in India today seems relatively safe. Indian law requires content providers to remove objectionable language, however the law functions to diffuse heightened tensions between different groups in India's diverse society and not as an instrument of social control. In practice, public citizens or the government officials have alerted companies such as Google about objectionable material on the Internet. After Google reviews the material itself, it then makes the decision of whether to remove it from the Internet. Additionally, social networking websites such as Orkut and Facebook are widely used in India. In contrast, China has banned the sites and similar technology because of the potential social unrest they might cause. But despite the relatively high measure of free speech Indians enjoy on the Internet, access to the Internet is limited. Only 81 million Indians have Internet access today.

Instead, the single greatest barrier to information access and the free flow of information in India today is still the country's long legacy of illiteracy. India's adult literacy rate today is a tragic 61%. And the continued gender divide is also deeply disturbing. As of 2005, literacy among adult males fell below 75%, while only 50% of adult women were literate.

In stark contrast, China has enjoyed extraordinary success in raising its literacy rates. Today it has an official literacy rate of 93.4%. The disparity is especially alarming since India and China had roughly comparable literacy rates of approximately 20% as young nations in 1950. Unlike India, China made universal literacy more than just a nominal goal in its overall development strategy. While India's excellent higher education system has enabled it to develop the human capacity to absorb new technology, its commitment to primary and secondary education has not been as strong.

Critics of illiteracy in India have blamed the failure to achieve universal literacy on the prevalence of child labor, teacher absenteeism, and a widespread complacency with the current social order. But despite continued challenges to achieving universal literacy, India has made substantial gains in both adult and youth literacy in a number of states.

Rising literacy rates have in turn fueled a media explosion in India. While print media is struggling in Europe and the United States, newspapers have grown rapidly in India. New publications abound in both regional languages and English, and they find their readerships in rural areas just as often as in urban ones. The increases in print media and literacy are correlated with increased political participation as awareness arises. Barriers still exist, but there are a number of signs that access to information in India is improving.

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